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The World: Beyond the Dalai Lama; His Successor Could Be the Solution

IN a small movie-and-noodle house on a side street in the Tibetan portion of this holy city, a pair of young monks in red robes were watching a Hong Kong kung fu movie and slurping bowls of the house special when the Dalai Lama's name came up.

''The Dalai Lama is everything,'' said one.

Like most other Tibetans, this young monk worships the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, like a god and a king. Despite years of Chinese efforts to discredit Tibet's religious leader and years of persecution of Tibetans who support him, Tibetans still express such fanatical devotion to the Dalai Lama that it is evident that China cannot ignore him.

Visiting Washington last week, the Dalai Lama said he wanted to negotiate with Beijing for greater self-rule in Tibet, but warned that there is such a deep level of distrust between his exiled forces and Beijing that real talks may not be possible for some time.

Chinese officials are so strongly opposed to the Dalai Lama precisely because he still has strong influence here, even though he fled in 1959. They portray him as the tool of foreign powers who want to undermine China's unity.

All of this creates a dilemma for the Chinese when it comes to dealing with the issue of succession. When the Dalai Lama -- who is 63 and apparently in good health -- dies, a replacement must be chosen within Tibet, now controlled by China. Will Chinese leaders try to control the selection with their own candidate, whom Tibetans may or may not believe in, or will they try to prevent the selection of a replacement altogether?

Tibetans cling to the ancient belief that their religious leader is reincarnated in a young boy somewhere on the Tibetan plateau, and he can be found only by a deeply mystical and secretive process that by its nature is open to manipulation and earthly interference, as it has been throughout centuries of Tibetan history.

The last time Tibetans chose a Dalai Lama, in the 1930's, Tibetan elders traveled to a holy lake and waited to have visions, which apparently came in only the most obscure way, reflecting simple sounds -- ''ah,'' ''ka'' and ''ma'' -- that they later decided may have been a reference to the northern area of Amdo, and perhaps to the nearby monastery of Kumbum.

Disguises and a Rosary

Iffy as this may sound, the elders later explained their choice of a young boy in Amdo, saying that he had recognized a rosary that belonged to the previous Dalai Lama and claiming it to be his own. The boy also identified the home monastery of the senior elder among them, they said, despite their disguises as ordinary tradesmen.

When the local warlord in the region heard that elders were looking for a reincarnation of an important Tibetan religious leader, he demanded fantastic bribes to let the child go.

Devout Tibetans say the procedure produced a remarkably charismatic and graceful leader who now charms audiences around the world with his arguments for nonviolent change in his homeland.

The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, though a cynic might observe that it came months after the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, perhaps in part as a way to condemn that act, which was unrelated to Tibet.

''The succession issue of the Dalai Lama is filled with irony, contradiction, and paradox,'' said Cheng Li, a professor of Chinese politics at Hamilton College in New York who is studying Tibet. ''It seems that the parties most interested -- the Chinese authorities, Tibetan exiles and the Western world -- are all hypocritical and inconsistent.''

Chinese leaders had a dry run for the succession issue when the Panchen Lama, recognized as the second-most important Tibetan religious figure, died unexpectedly at the age of 50 in 1989. The results have been disastrous.

Worried that exiled Tibetans might try to secretly name their own Panchen Lama, officials in Beijing authorized a search group to find a reincarnation whom they could control. They entrusted the abbot of Tashilumpo Monastery, the traditional seat of power for the Panchen Lama's sect of Tibetan Buddhism, to oversee the process.

A boy was duly found, in quite the same mystical fashion that produced the Dalai Lama. But the boy's name was quietly passed to the Dalai Lama, who approved the choice before Beijing had a chance to announce it. Beijing was so angered that it denounced the boy, put his parents under detention, arrested the abbot who had been in charge of the process and announced that a new boy would be selected.

Drawing Lots

Advised that past disagreements over the selection of a religious leader had sometimes been settled by drawing ivory lots from a holy golden urn, Beijing leaders chose this method.

It was quite a spectacle: A senior official of the atheist Communist Party overseeing an elaborate religious ceremony in Tibet, declaring that only Beijing could be the final arbiter of any choice. A new Panchen Lama was proclaimed.

But the damage was done. Today, most Tibetans seem to believe the first boy, who has disappeared, to be the true reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, and Beijing's second candidate to be a fake.

Next time around, Chinese officials say, they may decide that they are better off blocking the choice of any lama at all.

Ma Chongying, the deputy director of the Minority and Religious Affairs Bureau in Tibet, seemed to signal that as the preferred course recently when he said, ''When the Dalai Lama dies, he dies. There will be no replacement.''

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A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 1998, on Page 4004006 of the National edition with the headline: The World: Beyond the Dalai Lama; His Successor Could Be the Solution. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe